Creating Safe Churches

After the last few posts exploring the harm trauma survivors experience in the church, I wanted to start painting a positive vision for what cultivating trauma-safe churches might look like. This is likely to be one of those topics that perpetually has more to be said about it, so I suspect it’ll be a topic I revisit over time as my own learning develops.

For now, I’ve decided to share some of the core principles coming from the ‘trauma-informed framework,’ then I’ll share a couple of practical suggestions in follow-up post. Please feel free to add your own suggestions in the comments, and I’d love to update these posts over time as a live resource!

The language of “trauma-informed” comes from a framework that’s now being widely used by various sectors like education, government policy, medical care, etc. The good thing is that this means a lot of work has already been done by leading professionals to identify what core principles will create trauma-safe environments generally. While this isn’t a church-specific model and some contextualisation will be needed, the fact that so much of the work has already been done gives us a huge head-start in adapting our ministry practices.

A common misconception is that being ‘trauma-informed’ risks an overemphasis on people’s vulnerabilities, perpetuating an unhelpful ‘victim mindset’–on the contrary, the framework’s inception in the medical field is strengths-based and highlights the humanity, dignity, and agency of people affected by trauma:[1]

“Central to this perspective is viewing trauma-related responses from the vantage point of ‘what happened to you’ rather than ‘what’s wrong with you,’ recognizing these responses as survival strategies, and focusing on survivors’ individual and collective strengths.”

National Resource Center on Domestic Violence

The NSW Health website, for example, references six core principles for trauma-informed care adapted from studies by Fallot and Harris (2009) and Proffitt (2010).[2] The six core principles are:

1. Safety – emotional as well as physical e.g. is the environment welcoming?
2. Trust – is the service sensitive to people’s needs?
3. Choice – do you provide opportunity for choice?
4. Collaboration – do you communicate a sense of ‘doing with’ rather than ‘doing to’?
5. Empowerment – is empowering people a key focus?
6. Respect for Diversity – do you respect diversity in all its forms?”

NSW Health, https://www.health.nsw.gov.au/mentalhealth/psychosocial/principles/Pages/trauma-informed.aspx

These core principles are in turn adapted from the Blue Knot foundation which offers stacks of free resources such as this excellent 4-page fact sheet that unpacks the first five principles on the list above.

Obviously this is a non-exhaustive list of relevant principles, but as a starting point, I wanted to unpack each of those briefly and show what some initial contextualising into a religious environment might look like.

1. Safety

Start by recognising—and publicly acknowledging—that not everyone will experience safety by default. In fact, many people will experience a visceral sense of unsafety in their bodies. Neutrality is not enough to give trauma survivors a visceral sense of safety. That is, the mere absence of harm or danger isn’t enough to feel safe; trauma survivors need visible ‘markers of safety.’ I’ll probably write more about ‘markers of safety’ in another post, but a good diagnostic question to ask yourself is this: “If someone were to visit my church and their starting point was a nervous system on high alert, how many minutes would they need to wait before they find a visible marker of safety?” Are you conscious of what things function as markers of safety (or markers of unsafety)? Have you done the work to consider which aspects of your church practices may signal safety and which may signal the opposite?

Neutrality is not enough to give trauma survivors a visceral sense of safety.

As I discussed in Presumption of Safety, assuming that safety is a default state available to everyone marginalises and harms a long list of people. Instead, we can publicly acknowledge the experiences of people who show up at church feeling uncomfortable or unsafe, and gently speak to those experiences in our worship leading, prayers, and preaching. When we speak directly to these stories, we show that we expect trauma survivors to be in the room: this is a space for them.

Consider both a physical sense of safety (what kind of seating is available, how accessible is it, is there a mask-wearers zone for at-risk people to sit in, are there privacy concerns with certain seating being publicly visible in the online livestream) as well as psychological safety.

Remember, safety and comfort are not the same thing, and a lack of safety involves a bodily response to very specific neurobiological processes. Reestablishing a visceral sense of safety is essential for a person’s brain to be able to engage in learning and to connect meaningfully in relationship.

2. Trust

Do we assume trust by default, or do we actually work to foster a trusting relationship with a real person? For someone who doesn’t have the privilege to be able to safely trust strangers by default, are they being pressured into a compulsory ‘meet and greet’ situation halfway through the service when everyone is instructed to “say hello to the person next to you.”?

Is our approach to teaching premised on an exercise of power (a leader speaks from a place of authority and therefore everyone else must listen) or premised on trust built on meaningful relationships and mutual listening?

Earning trust and showing attunement are closely linked. The Blue Knot Foundation fact sheet above says about trust: “Pay ongoing attention to your and their non-verbal communication. Is the person showing signs of stress? Are you being sufficiently supportive?”

One of our key challenges is that traditional White evangelical church practices allow little opportunity to attune to congregants’ responses, even though church need not inherently be this way (see addendum below for more thoughts on this).*

3. Choice

This one is so important to restoring a sense of agency to trauma survivors. Without choice, people’s agency is limited, and for trauma survivors it is absolutely critical to their healing that they experience control over their own bodies, stories, and relationships.

This includes giving them multiple options about how they choose to engage with different parts of a religious gathering, as well as developing a broader culture of each person maintaining healthy boundaries within their sphere of control.

“To be trauma-safe churches, we must be willing to follow Jesus in inviting survivors to ‘take heart’ and to restore safe boundaries through the exhilaration of recovering personal agency and autonomy. … In Herman’s words, ‘Trauma robs the victim of a sense of power and control; the guiding principle of recovery is to restore power and control to the survivor.’ Safety cannot occur without knowing that you are the arbiter of your own body, story, and healing journey.”

Joshua Cockayne, Preston Hill, and Scott Harrower, Dawn of Sunday: The Trinity and Trauma-Safe Churches, Chapter 5, E-book version

Giving people choice looks like asking for consent before praying for someone and asking them how they’d like you to pray for them. It looks like giving people different options for how to engage with communion or opt out without embarrassment—and the same for the classic ‘introduce yourself to your neighbour’ move.

It looks like introducing songs with an awareness that people can and should take different postures in worship—so while introductions like “let’s joyfully celebrate God’s amazing love for us as we sing this song!” are entirely appropriate, so too are acknowledgements (perhaps at a different point in the service) that people enter this space with heavy hearts, and invitations to those people to listen or pray during the singing while their church family sing truths over them that they feel they cannot say for themselves yet.

4. Collaboration

This is a natural extension of recognising people’s agency; when trauma survivors aren’t just victims to be pitied but humans with dignity and agency to be honoured, we ought to partner with them and learn from their insights collaboratively.

This is especially true in areas that disproportionately affect people with trauma backgrounds, such as pastoral care practices. Rather than a church staff team strategising about how to offer care to people with trauma backgrounds (like putting together a ‘care team’ for a person with high pastoral care needs), they could consult with trauma survivors themselves about what they need and what resources and insights that person already has to offer.

The same applies to preparing content warnings for talks on sensitive topics; humble and trauma-informed leadership would collaborate with people who have skin in the game on those topics before proceeding. For example, good leadership when speaking on a topic like disability would (at a bare minimum) consult with disabled people at every stage of the process; better leadership would take collaboration to the next level and actually hand over the mic to a suitably qualified disabled person to speak on that topic themselves.

5. Empowerment

“Understand that interpersonal trauma often stems from and fosters disempowerment, and that taking steps to feeling more empowered is essential to healing.”

Blue Knot Foundation

Empowering people begins with identifying the specific areas in which trauma survivors have been disempowered (e.g. loss of bodily autonomy, having their voices silenced, being denied the right to think for themselves/hold divergent opinions, having their moral intuition violated or invalidated, etc.) and seeking to actively restore empowerment in those areas.

Empowerment also means allowing that person to be the main agent in their own healing. Never do for someone what they can do for themselves! Something I was guilty of when I was a ministry apprentice was trying to compassionately care for people but doing so in ways that positioned myself as the saviour figure in their narrative and actually stripped them of agency in their own healing. No matter how kind my intentions may have been, I look back and realise that I still caused harm, and in some cases I believe my actions have caused lasting wounds that I deeply regret.

A good practice is to respond to people sharing a problem by empathising and then asking questions that recognise their agency: “That situation sounds really rough. What are you going to do about it?”

We can even offer help in a way that still gives the other person control over their situation: “I’d really love to support you in this. What do you need from me?”

6. Diversity/Cultural Competency

A culture of diversity signals that people of all kinds are expected, welcomed, and valued in this space. A community that features diversity is one that is already accustomed to navigating substantial differences in worldview/perspective and living in the tension that comes with doing life alongside people who experience the world differently. For this reason, even when one’s own demographic is not represented, the presence of other diverse experiences still counts as a marker of safety. We don’t need to be surrounded by people who are just like us; we need to be surrounded by people who are committed to understanding us and navigating complexity generously.

A rich culture of diversity also needs to be represented in leadership; no matter how diverse the community might be, if all the people making decisions are still from a single demographic (you know the one I mean), the culture will still lack diversity. Diversity in people and diversity in culture aren’t the same.

We don’t need to be surrounded by people who are like just us; we need to be surrounded by people who are committed to understanding us and navigating complexity generously.

In an imperfect world where we often don’t get it right, valuing diversity means at least recognising when certain people and experiences are absent in that space and lamenting that: e.g. an all-male ministry staff team would, in an ideal world, employ women leaders, but in the meantime they would do well to at least acknowledge the male-centricity of the current leadership and their resulting blindspots. Similarly, a predominantly White church that sings exclusively worship songs from a White evangelical tradition would be healthier for at least recognising that this church is not representative of God’s family of all tribes, nations, languages, and cultures, and remembering that there are rich perspectives missing from this community. Self-awareness goes a long way.

If diversity is a value for a particular church, it’s important to make sure this is visible to people. Several people have told me what a difference it made to read a statement in the church bulletin or website that assured them they were welcome. My church’s website has a link to a “Diversity and Inclusion” statement on the home page. The statement opens like this:

We value diversity.

We believe the breadth of God’s love for the world in Jesus is expressed in the inclusion of people from every tribe and tongue and nation.

In our church community this is expressed in the inclusion of people of different ages, genders, ethnicities, backgrounds, sexual orientation, sub-cultures, and marital status.

Like I’ve said before, this visibility is important, because many people won’t feel safe enough to even step inside your church for the first time without some initial markers of safety that are visible from the outside. Church websites can do a lot of the heavy lifting to offer transparency, giving vulnerable people clear information that empowers informed choices.

In my next post, I’ll share some more concrete ideas that begin to put some of these principles into practice.

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* Further thoughts on building trust and attuning to people’s responses:

One of our big challenges is that contemporary White evangelical church cultures favour Bible teaching models that are inherently incompatible with attuning to people’s responses. We prioritise a 1-way communication medium where one person with all the power has the voice, while everyone else is required to listen without speaking, without asking questions or clarification, without showing their own reactions to what has been said, or having their body language attuned to, let alone responded to. There may be historical, cultural, and even theological reasons to justify this sermon-as-monologue teaching style, but it’s not a neutral decision.

A trauma-informed approach to teaching the Bible might look like a more richly relational pedagogy, where a suitably qualified person (or several people in conversation!) can still teach authoritatively, but in a more interactive environment where people’s reactions and questions are not seen as distractions but welcomed as valuable data that allows Bible teaching to connect with where people’s hearts are actually at and to answer the questions people are actually asking. Ask any teacher how to meaningfully engage a room in memorable learning and they’ll tell you that monologuing at people is one of the least effective approaches available. Talking at people as though their own responses have no value erodes trust and limits good learning.

Even within a monological approach, there is far more room for allowing people’s responses to be expressed and attuned to than the White evangelical church usually imagines. The ‘talk-back culture’ of Black and Latino church cultures normalises congregants calling out reactions all throughout the sermon (and worship!) and normalises the preacher asking non-rhetorical questions to the congregation and inviting genuine responses in real-time, even while teaching authoritatively. I’ll share some more practical ideas on this topic in the next post.

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[1] Trauma-Informed Care in Behavioral Health Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (Rockville, MD: 2014), Appendix C: Historical Account of Trauma.

[2] Roger Fallot and Maxine Harris, “Creating Cultures of Trauma-informed Care (CCTIC): A Self-assessment and Planning Protocol,” University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine (2009); Brenda Proffitt, “Delivering Trauma-informed Services,” Healing Hands 14:6 (2010), 3.